An evil scheme to ruin the national pastime

(Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-Ledger)Mets pitcher Johan Santana: If Bruce Bukiet's math is right, then he and every other National League pitcher should never get a chance to hold a bat.

In his book "Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball," George F. Will offered this observation: "Proof of the genius of ancient Greece is that it understood baseball’s future importance."

That leads me to make this observation: George, you’re thinking too hard. It’s only a game. Sit back, have a beer and enjoy it. If you take it too seriously, you could end up ruining it.

I came to that conclusion last week after a discussion with Bruce Bukiet. Bukiet’s a guy I like to chat with from time to time about one of my favorite subjects, probabilities. When he’s not doing his day job, which is teaching math at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Bukiet is subjecting baseball to mathematical analysis.

As the recent movie "Moneyball" showed, baseball is a game that can be reduced to numbers. And when you run the numbers, you find some surprising things. When Bukiet entered all the data from the 1989 National League season into a computer program, for example, he came to a couple of logical but heretical conclusions: The cleanup hitter should not be batting cleanup and the pitcher should be batting eighth instead of ninth.

Not long after I discussed that with Bukiet, I was watching a playoff game. I noticed how the manager juggled relief pitchers to match the batters in the final innings. That prompted me to come up with a heretical notion of my own: Why not start the game with a reliever? If it makes sense to use a certain pitcher to get the last three batters out, then statistically that’s no different from using a certain pitcher to get the first three batters out.

In honor of the start of the 2012 season, I decided to run it by Bukiet. Bukiet replied that the idea would indeed seem to make sense for a team that had the right lineup of pitchers. But then the mad professor added a wrinkle of his own.

"I have had an idea for a number of years that has a morsel of your thought in it and it would certainly ruin baseball," he replied in an e-mail. "It would only work in the National League, but I am pretty sure that after it works for a year, almost all NL teams would adopt it."

The idea: You don’t just start a reliever. You use nothing but relievers. In Bukiet’s scheme, no team need ever send a pitcher to the plate. Through clever rotation of pitchers and pinch hitters, a National League team could gain an offensive advantage rivaling that of an American League team. Because of the designated-hitter rule, AL teams consistently score about half a run more per game than NL teams, he said.

"That’s about 80 runs per year, and with the rule of thumb of 10 extra runs gets you about one extra win, that gives you eight extra wins," Bukiet wrote. "Your average (81-81) team immediately becomes a playoff contender, with 89 wins."

The scheme involves a lot of double switches and other lineup moves. But it seems to make sense. "Moneyball" revolved around creating a batting lineup made up of role players instead of highly paid superstars. Bukiet proposes doing that with pitchers. Why sign an expensive starter who plays once every five days when you can hire a bunch of lower-salaried relievers who can go out there two days in a row if needed?

"Such a team would cost far less than typical big-budget teams," Bukiet said. "The union might not like me, but the owners might."

They might indeed — once one of them tried out his scheme. It’s a natural progression. A century ago, the starting pitcher was expected to finish the game. Eventually, relief pitchers became the norm. And then that specialty was further divided into long relievers and short relievers. The next logical step is just to divvy up the duties for the entire 27 outs.

So there you go. If this idea goes viral, Will and the rest of the deep thinkers of the diamond are not going to be pleased. But that’s what happens when you think too much.

Next week: Bukiet and I destroy basketball.

Oops, never mind. The NBA already did.

Below: Check Bukiet's 2011 predictions below and then compare them to the update on his website here.